The Texas conservative's underdog Senate campaign on Monday published a defiant statement, claiming that Stockman has "grounds to file criminal complaints" against any person or media organization that published his 1977 arrest record and mugshot.

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act last June, justices left it to Congress to decide how to fix the law. But while Congress deliberates, activists are turning again to the courts: At least 10 lawsuits have the potential to bring states and some local jurisdictions back under federal oversight – essentially doing an end-run around the Supreme Court's ruling.

Sam Bell is in the third year of a PhD program in geology at Brown University. Geology as in rocks. But Bell also moonlights as the the state coordinator of The Rhode Island Progressive Democrats, the state affiliate of the 10-year-old Progressive Democrats of America. And in his work with The Rhode Island Progressive Democrats, Bell was instrumental to the investigation that ultimately led to the National Rifle Association paying the second largest campaign finance fine in the state's history.

Last year, Bell and his group started digging into the financial relationship between the NRA's state-level political action committee, which over the previous decade had given tens of thousands of dollars to Rhode Island lawmakers, and the NRA's national PAC, known as the NRA Political Victory Fund. What Bell and his associates found led them to file a complaint with the state's Board of Elections, alleging a number of serious campaign finance violations. In apparent response, the NRA last year quietly dissolved its Rhode Island PAC. Then, earlier this year, news came that the pro-gun group had reached a settlement with the state, and agreed to pay a $63,000 fine -- officially for not creating a separate bank account for money the state PAC received from the larger national PAC.

In an interview with TPM this week, Bell explained how his interest in science led him to politics.

"The thing that first got me interested in getting involved in politics was watching how science got devastated by cuts to fundings, particularly at the federal level but also at the state level." Bell said. "I had the sort of disappointing realization that politics has a huge amount to do with the advancement of science. And in many ways the best thing one can do for science is to get politicians to be willing to support it.

Bell spoke to TPM about his group's investigation into the NRA's activities. An edited version of the conversation is below.

Gary Melius was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Long Island, N.Y. "castle" he calls home on Monday when a gunman came up and shot at him three times -- striking him once on the side of the head.

Before dawn on Labor Day, a 24-year-old Springtown, Texas man named Arron Keahey began chatting with another young man named Brice Johnson through a mobile app called MeetMe. The two had never spoken before, and after they had chatted for a little while, the conversation turned sexual. Keahey's MeetMe page indicated that he was gay. Johnson's page did not.

A massive document dump released this week about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has revealed some embarrassing tidbits about former aides to the governor. So far there hasn't been a bombshell directly linking governor to legal misconduct, but the the slow burn of the scandal -- and his reluctance to answer questions about it -- may drag down any presidential or vice-presidential ambitions Walker had in 2016.

"I think it's damaging, not because there was a lot of new information in the emails that were released, but because it put the story back on the front pages and it's really displaced the other things that the governor would prefer to talk about in an re-election year," University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry C. Burden told TPM.